Weekend reads: The American press gets its groove back

U.S. media is 'dragging itself back from the brink.' Will Canada follow?

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A story broke last weekend that I’ve been waiting a long time to see. In an interview with Ben Smith at Semafor, Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times, effectively announced the return of journalism to its pre-Trump era standards, stating that the role of the news media “is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other.” Kahn pushed back on the activist ethos in newsrooms, blasted journalists that expect their work to be a reflection of personal politics, and acknowledged the Times went “too far” in 2020 and is now re-establishing norms in the wake of these “excesses.”

It was a stunning moment.

Speaking about the story on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Ben Smith described the Grey Lady as being “focused on dragging itself back from the brink.” He said that “what’s happening inside the New York Times is a sense that, during particularly the summer of 2020, they aligned themselves too much with particularly the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.” And that Khan considers it his job to pull the institution back.

The context for Kahn’s stance is ongoing tensions between the Times and the White House (in part because the President won’t grant the paper a sit-down interview), and comments from podcaster and former Obama aide Dan Pfeiffer in particular. The Pod Save America co-host recently complained in a Substack post that the Times is “often too worried about seeming balanced to truly articulate the danger of Trump.” And that journalists “do not see their job as saving democracy or stopping an authoritarian from taking power.”

These statements angered Kahn, and with good reason. In response, he mounted one of the most plainspoken defences of journalistic independence we’ve seen in years.

The line in the sand was, in fact, eight years in the making. In August of 2016, in the pages of the Times, Jim Rutenberg wrote a piece, “Trump Is Testing the Norms of Objectivity in Journalism,” that arguably set the tone for the industry. In that essay, Rutenberg urged the press “to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer” to combat the threat he believed Trump posed. Others, including David Mindich, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, expressed similar sentiments. The press largely heeded this call.

But guardrails exists for a reason, and pulling these guardrails down came with unintended consequences, including the hemorrhaging of public trust.

Now Kahn has rejected this ethos out of hand. “To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda,” he told Semafor. Kahn added:

… there’s a very good chance, based on our polling and other independent polling, that he will win that election in a popular vote. So there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening.

He went on:

It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one — immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them? I don’t even know how it’s supposed to work in the view of Dan Pfeiffer or the White House. We become an instrument of the Biden campaign? We turn ourselves into Xinhua News Agency or Pravda and put out a stream of stuff that’s very, very favorable to them and only write negative stories about the other side? And that would accomplish — what?

Turning his attention to campus protests, and the ethos of the young journalists entering newsrooms, Kahn noted that “I don’t think that this generation of college grads has been fully prepared for what we are asking our people to do, which is to commit themselves to the idea of independent journalism.” He stressed: “The newsroom is not a safe space. It’s a space where you’re being exposed to lots of journalism, some of which you are not going to like.”

In job interviews, the Times now asks candidates what they would do if they had to cover a story that involved views they found upsetting. If the candidate says they’d reject the assignment, the paper is not the best place for them to work.

In other words: The adults in the room are reasserting themselves.

For those of us who support the old school aims of objectivity, open debate, and viewpoint diversity, this is a welcome position from the most influential paper in the world — and hopefully one that signals a return to more normal operating procedures for the entire legacy media, which desperately needs to regain the public’s trust.

Here’s the thing: The Canadian press followed the U.S. media into this mess. Now we need to follow our American colleagues out of it.

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There are, in fact, some early signs that such a shift in Canadian media is underway. On Monday, I attended an energizing, off-the-record forum on the future of news in Ottawa, hosted by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, that brought together a number of industry players, including independent outlets and some of our country’s most outspoken press members. I can say this: After hearing what I heard at that gathering, I don’t expect the stifling status quo to hold much longer.

Then, on Tuesday evening, I attended an event at Massey College in Toronto, where former Globe and Mail columnist Liz Renzetti interviewed the iconic Washington Post editor Martin Baron. During that conversation, Baron unequivocally defended old school journalistic values. “I feel that that [our] work benefits from approaching it through a method of objectivity rather than making it seem like you’re just some sort of partisan, and you’re an advocate,” Baron told the audience. “I think you lose credibility when you do that. It doesn’t add to your journalism, it detracts from your journalism. You should let the journalism speak for itself.”

He went on: “If there’s one area of crisis — a huge area of crisis in journalism — that’s the crisis of trust. We should do everything we can to strengthen thoughts of trust with the public rather than weaken them. So, I don’t apologize for being old school in that way at all.”

Baron also stressed that objectivity has been chronically misunderstood:

[Objectivity is] the idea that you try to approach your work as best you can. The way a scientist would approach his or her work in an experiment is that you have a hypothesis. You pursue the hypothesis, but then you would let the evidence actually tell you whether it’s true or not. You don’t select the evidence, and say, “Oh, I’m going to pick the stuff that confirms my view and I’m going to ignore the evidence that contradicts my view.”

[You say], “I’m going to look at it honestly, and honourably, and comprehensively, and rigorously, and independently. I’m going to talk to everybody I need to talk to. I’m going to look at all the documents I need to look at. I’m going to be honourable and honest about this.”

Because to do otherwise would be a journalistic fraud, the way that you would have scientific fraud.

The fact that we in the press don’t meet these standards all the time, Baron continued, is no reason to throw the standards out.

I have to say, this was the first full-throated defence of objectivity I’ve heard at any Canadian media event in recent memory.

It’s about time.

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In yet another promising sign this week, veteran media critic Jack Shafer published a much buzzed-about essay in Politico, “The Collapse of the News Industry Is Taking Its Soul Down With It.” The fiery essay makes a strong case for the press reclaiming its swagger:

Swagger is the conformity-killing practice of journalism, often done in defiance of authority and custom, to tell a true story in its completeness, no matter whom it might offend. It causes some people to subscribe and others to cancel their subscriptions, and gives journalists the necessary courage and direction to do their best work. Swagger was once journalism’s calling card, but in recent decades it’s been sidelined. In some venues, reporters now do their work with all the passion of an accountant, and it shows in their guarded, couched and equivocating copy. Instead of relishing controversy, today’s newsrooms shy away from publishing true stories that someone might claim cause “harm” — that modern term that covers all emotional distress — or even worse, which could offend powerful interests.

The loss of swagger, he writes, “has left readers struggling to decipher pieces that appear to have been reported through a veil, or worse still, sound as if they were manufactured by the public affairs department of a cabinet-level agency.”

Shafer cites Substack as a bright spot in our cautious, conformist media landscape, and singles out The Free Press, founded by Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles, in particular. (Stay tuned, readers, next week Nellie is on the Lean Out podcast to talk about her very relevant book, Morning After the Revolution...)

Shafer’s call for the press to rediscover its backbone resonates. Not just with me, I expect, but with the many media workers and managers across North America who are beyond frustrated with the radicals in their midst, who are busy driving our beleaguered industry into the ground.

But whether we in the media can actually manage to get our swagger back — our cojones, to paraphrase the editor Tina Brown — remains an open question.